So Alexander had been married before, but to whom?

 Knowing that Alexander’s daughters Ann and Mary were supposed to have been born in Strathglass, it was possible that Alexander had married a Strathglass lass.  I decided to look for a marriage certificate on Scotland’s People.  I knew that Ann had been born about 1858 so I searched for any marriages taking place in Strathglass in 1857 +/- 2 years and I searched only for Alexander McRae.  Incredibly, only two records came up in the search and when I opened the second record there he was.

 On the 25th June, 1857, Alexander married Jane Morrison at Struy Church in the Parish of Kilmorack.  He was 33 years old, a shepherd, who at the time of marriage was residing at Lochournhead in the Parish of Glenelg.  Alexander’s parents were Alexander and Ann m.s McPhie, as mentioned on his marriage certificate to Mary, so I was confident this was the marriage I’d been looking for. 

 Jane was 27.  She was living at Comer, Kilmorack.  Her father, Donald Morrison, was also a shepherd and her mother was Christian m.s MacLennan.  It was fairly safe to assume that Jane was the mother of Ann and Mary but I needed to know for sure.  Searches on Scotlands People confirmed my thoughts.  

 Ann was born on the 28th May, 1858, at Comer.  It was her grandfather, Donald, who registered the birth and had been present at the time of the birth. Presumably Alexander was away shepherding at the time.  

 Mary was born several years later on the 19th May, 1862, at Kerrow, Kiltarlity.      This time Alexander was present and it was he who registered the birth.  I was so excited to find Ann and Mary’s birth certificates that I missed the fact that the gap between Ann and Mary was quite big.

 Having found Jane and confirming that both Ann and Mary were definitely born in Strathglass I went back to the 1861 census to find the family.  I still couldn’t find them under Alexander so I tried searching for Jane.  I had to use wildcards to find the record as McRae had been incorrectly transcribed so she wasn’t easy to find. When I did find her,  there was yet another surprise.

Scotland's People 1861 Census Entry.

Alexander is not on the census, which is not surprising.  As a shepherd it would not have been unusual for him to spend time away from home.  Jane is described as Head of the house and a shepherd’s wife.  Ann, age 3 is also on the census, so again I was fairly confident that I had the right household. The surprising entry was their one year old son Donald, who had been born in Kintail.   When Alexander and Mary marry, they go on to have a twin son called Donald, but neither my mother nor my grandfather were aware of an earlier Donald.  This isn’t altogether surprising as no one was actually aware of Alexander’s first marriage to Jane.  Also mentioned on the census is 8 year old Catherine McRae, a servant, born in Kiltarlity.  I was very surprised to see a shepherd’s family with a servant and have since discovered that in the earlier census records a relative was often described as a servant when they may actually have been a niece or a nephew.   I put Catherine to one side and focused on Donald.  I needed to confirm that Donald really was Alexander and Jane’s son.  

 Another search on Scotland’s people produced a birth certificate for Donald.  Donald was born on 19th November, at Aultcairn, Longord in the Parish of Kintail.  Alexander registered the birth at Kintail on the 7th December, but was not present at the birth.  My curiosity was well and truly piqued because I knew that Donald does not appear on the 1871 census with the rest of the family, at Gress in Lewis.  What happened to him?

 Sadly, 3 months after Mary was born, Jane died of pneumonia, in August 1862.  At some point between August 1862 and 1866 Alexander and his young family move to the Isle of Lewis but by 1871 Donald is no longer with them.  I searched for a death certificate for Donald but nothing came up.  The wonderful Anne Fraser from the Highland Archive Centre suggested re-searching the census records using wildcards.  When we did that, we found him, hiding behind a very poor transcription spelling.  Donald was still in Strathglass, living with his aunt and uncle - Jane’s sister and brother-in-law.  For reasons I may never discover, Alexander took Ann and Mary to Lewis and left Donald behind.  I’ve done some further research on Donald.  He has his own story to tell, but that’s for another day.

It’s been a busy month of marketing, promoting and researching, since I kicked off this blog.  Posts will become more frequent from now on.  

 At the end of my first post, I mentioned a surprising discovery. 

 My Mum had varying bits of information on the McRae’s.  They were easy to trace in Lewis from 1871.  Alexander, Mary and their 6 children all appear on the 1871 Census.  Anne and Mary are shown as being born in Strathglass, whilst the four boys were born in Gress, Lewis.  Pre 1871, everything was a mystery.  

Taken from the 1871 census. Crown Copyright National Records of Scotland

 By the time I began properly researching our family history, I had the benefit of Scotland’s People and sites like Ancestry and Find My Past, but none of that was helping.  I couldn’t find any reference to the family being in Strathglass.  We double checked Struy graveyard several times over, but none of the McRae’s buried there were our McRae’s.  Despite the information in the 1871 census, I was beginning to doubt they’d ever been in Strathglass.  

 I tried a different tack.  Instead of looking for them on earlier census forms, I decided to try and find Alexander and Mary’s marriage certificate and this was when I made the first of several surprising and exciting discoveries. 

I carried out initial searches, looking for them in Glenelg and Strathglass but nothing came up,  so I looked to see if they had married in Lewis, and jackpot. 

At first, I didn’t think I had the right couple.  Everything matched but the marriage date was 1866 and Anne and Mary were both born several years before this date, however, under Alexander’s name was a word that at first glance looked a bit like ‘tricolour’, but on proper examination said ‘widower’.  Alexander had been married before. 

Marriage Certificate for Alexander and Mary McRae

This discovery raised the strong possibility that Mary McKenzie was not Anne and Mary’s mother, as my mother and grandfather had always believed. Which led to the question, 'If she wasn’t, then who was?'

This and all family history websites should really come with a health warning because researching your family history can become exceedingly addictive and if you're not careful, costly.

I've had to discipline myself to not run down every rabbit hole I find, and there are many, and note them down to return to later. Researching the history, people and places of the Highlands is a real passion and family history research is the perfect hit. It brings people and places to life.  Your perception of place changes when you begin to look at it through the eyes of the people who lived and worked there.  

This blog is where I will talk about my research.  In particular, I will focus on my own family history, but before I do, a little bit about me.

I live just outside the village of Culbokie, which is situated on the north side of the Black Isle.  I have lived here permanently since the late 80's, having grown up in North Yorkshire, Germany and a year in the Lake District.

My grandparents both came from England, but in the early 1970's they built a house in Fortrose, on the south side of the Black Isle.  A close relative commented a number of times that my Grandfather was returning home and mentioned the nearby places of Struy and Strathglass as places where family had come from.  

The Black Isle has always been home to me.  It's where we came on holiday and as I soon as I left school, this is where I came and this is where I've been ever since.  

We live on a 30 acre small holding, where for a time we bred Arabian horses.  We no longer breed, but we are still owned by a number of horses, poultry, sheeps and a solitary goat.  We also have 4 rescue hounds, 2 rescue cats and a young cat that arrived here in 2023 and decided she was staying.  All my work fits around the care and attention of our animals and land.  

I have known about the existence of Alexander McRae since I was wee and I was fascinated with him.  For a long time, we didn't have much information to go on.  Mum and my grandfather had gone along to the library in Inverness and had trawled through miles of microfiche  searching for him in the census returns.  They knew that my great great granny, Annie, and her sister, Mary, had been born in Strathglass and that the family had then moved to Lewis. Alexander and his wife Mary added 4 boys to their brood, 2 of whom were twins and became eminent doctors in South Africa.  All the McRae's were gaelic speakers.  We knew that Annie and possibly Mary went into service and moved to England.  For a long time, that was it.  That was all we knew.  

Alexander has unwittingly influenced much of my adult life.  I was fascinated by the possibility of a Gaelic heritage.  I love the language and I love living up here and working outdoors.  He led me to a degree in Gaelic Scotland and a Masters in Highlands and Islands Literature.  I read lots of books on this area, hoping for a mention of Alexander.  I dabbled in Ancestry, hunting for Alexander and his family in Strathglass and finding absolutely nothing.  The only evidence they had ever lived in Strathglass came from the Lewis census of 1871 which states that both girls were born there.  For a few more years they remained an allusive mystery.

Mum, my daughter Eilidh, and I, visited the graveyard attached to Struy Church, as it was thought that Mary may have returned to Strathglass and was buried there, but nothing.  By this point I had become a tour guide.  I could have made a fortune from the number of guests who asked if I would help them research their ancestors. However, if I couldn't find my own family, I certainly couldn't take money to try and find other peoples ancestors.   Places, historical events and social history I was great with, but to begin researching family histories I had to know what I was doing.

I enrolled on Pharos courses and attended courses at the Highland Archive centre and realised that once I knew where and how to look, I was just adding another set of resources to my researching skills.  I couldn't wait to continue the search for my own family members and I very quickly made a surprising discovery that changed who we are and where we thought we came from.